When the news broke today that the TTC was considering a ten cent fair hike and a reduction in service to 48 bus routes, I was shocked. Then outraged. Then enraged. Now, strangely calm.

Read the rest of this article »

Ah, municipal politics. Of the three levels of government in this country, it’s clearly the one closest to home, and yet we Torontonians can’t be bothered with it. Or, rather, we can be bothered by it, but instead of getting all, you know, actionable about it, we’re content to resign ourselves to the ballot choices the echo chamber media convinces us are in our best interests.

Case in point: it seems the vast majority of thinking people in this city are telling me to vote for George Smitherman in an effort to stop Rob Ford from becoming mayor. Now, you don’t have to convince me not to vote for Ford. As much as I sort of admire his cost-cutting agenda, I really don’t think he’d make a good leader for this city. He’s not a fan of transit or bike lanes (and why would he be? His constituency doesn’t really use either), which are probably the biggest issues for me personally in this election. Plus, he’s kind of boorish. I don’t want him representing Toronto to the world. Do you?

Read the rest of this article »

I recently tumbled an article (via boingboing) called “How the Paperback Novel Changed Popular Literature” that told the story of how Penguin started publishing cheap, little, iconic books in the 1930s and (almost) singlehandedly reignited a popular interest in reading by producing novels that could be had for the price of a pack of cigarettes and could fit in your pocket.

Allen Lane [Penguin's founder] stated that he “believed in the existence…of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it.”

The article makes special mention of the role the publisher’s brand played in the success of their paperbacks. The colour-coded covers, clear, bold typeface, and, let’s face it, adorable logo made it a lot less odious to delve into classic and contemporary literature and in their first year of existence, Penguin sold over three million copies of their first ten titles.

Now, this is all very interesting to me personally because my first encounter with Penguin books had nothing at all to do with their early branding (as nice as it was). No, from a very young age, I was exposed to a much different style of Penguin paperback, specifically their Classic and Modern Classic lines. These novels (unlike the earlier colourful versions) had very muted branding and featured covers filled with some related example of fine art (usually a painting, but sculptures and drawings as well). I’ve always been struck by the strange relationship between the art on the cover and the story inside these Penguin books, so I started scanning the few that I had in the hopes of building some kind of archive that could be shared with other Penguin lovers.

Everyone seems to have some of these Penguin editions lying around. If you’ve got any, email me if you’d like to add them, or just holler in the comments.

It’s always nice when you get the chance to catch up with friends you haven’t seen in awhile. Such was the case last Thursday when I got to spend some time cracking a few beers and sparking some conversation with Baker. He also introduced me to Mr. Leonard Cohen. Of course, I’d heard of him, but I’d never really listened to the man speak, or read any of his poetry. Baker played me an interview Cohen did in 1966, and I was really taken with it, and him.

As Baker said, “Watch this, and tell me if, by the end of it, the interviewer doesn’t totally want him.”

Here I am, 26 years old and sitting in some upstairs bar on College listening to a band whose name I didn’t catch and probably wouldn’t remember anyway. I’m surrounded by fake ID’d highschool kids drinking draft beer out of mugs too big for their hands, complimenting each other on their funny and ironic t-shirts. There are girls in aquamarine go-go dresses and homemade frocks bopping to the music, their hoop earrings clinking, keeping time for the adolescent vocalist and his oversized guitar. He pauses in his warbling every few beats to give a shake to his head, getting the unruly mop of hair out of his eyes and it’s like watching a weekend rockstar being born. It’s a Sunday but not a school night.

There are slightly-wrinkled, slightly-bearded twenty and thirty-somethings lined up on stools at the bar in the back, knocking back shots of Red Label and watching the original Transformers flick – the animated one – on an anachronistically fitting Betamax VCR. Before that it was Labyrinth, Bowie’s Goblin King codpiece taking up almost the entire 13″ television set. The entire room – from the makeshift stage at the front to the washrooms and coat racks at the back – is a mish-mash of ages, of generations even, and I don’t know quite what to make of it yet.

Maybe I’ve just been out of “the scene” for too long. That is, if I was ever in it to begin with.

Read the rest of this article »

Anyone who’s ever taken an Intro to Psych class has probably heard of Stanley Milgram. He was the Yale professor who experimented on just how far regular, decent folk were willing to go in hurting (see: torturing) fellow human beings when instructed to do so by an authority figure. The original experiment was conducted in 1961, around the time of Adolf Eichmann’s Nazi war crimes trial, and Milgram sought to discern whether it was fair to say that the Nazi rank-and-file were “just following orders” regarding the Jewish genocide. Could they be absolved of culpability because a systemic mob mentality “told” them to commit atrocities?

What Milgram found in his experiment (you can read about it here) was that, surprisingly, normal people, taken off the street, brought into the lab, and given instructions by a seemingly authoritative figure, were willing to inflict mass amounts of pain on a complete stranger – because they were simply told to.

Flash forward to 2008. Dr. Jerry Burger of the University of Santa Clara re-enacted Milgram’s experiment, and guess what he found? We’re still a bunch of weak-willed sociopaths.

“What we found is validation of the same argument – if you put people in certain situations, they will act in surprising and maybe often even disturbing ways.”

Now, I’ve never been a part of an experiment of this kind, but I’d really like to think I’d be able to stop and say, “No fucking way.” No matter who the “authority figure” is, if what I’m doing is causing someone to actually scream in pain, I think I’d have the strength of character to put a stop to it. Is that really so hard? When did we as a society stop believing in personal responsibility? Is that even the right question to ask?

Is handwriting passé? Has it outlived its usefulness? Such is Anne Trubek’s assertion in Issue #9 of Good Magazine, in an article titled, surprisingly, “Stop Teaching Handwriting“. Apparently, since the writer’s kid has trouble learning his uppercase G’s and S’s, a wholesale abandonment of the medium is in order. Forgive my ignorance, but isn’t the ability to write legibly a big part of being literate? You may as well stop teaching children how to pronounce words properly. 

I don’t care how proficient your typing skills are or just how paperless you’ve made your office; you still need to know how to write clearly and, well… rightly. To be sure, I have an above-average level of digital engagement, but I still enjoy – even prefer – writing stuff down. With a pencil. On paper (especially class notes: of the many “digital pen” devices I’ve come across, none beats a sharpened piece of lead and a notebook… the kind with pages). Assuming of course that we have the logistical ability to eschew handwriting altogether, should we? Personally, I find the kinds of documents I type out are usually professional in nature, which eases revisions and corrections (not to mention speed). But when I’m writing for pleasure – a short-story or a poem or a letter – I much prefer the tangible sensation of marking the blank page myself.

There’s lots of stuff we teach kids today that they don’t necessarily need, stuff they could easily use a computer to accomplish. But isn’t education about instilling some sense of pleasure in between the lessons and repetition? Shouldn’t we teach kids to enjoy expressing themselves? Handwriting is arguably the most accessible mode of communication (second only, perhaps, to speech). Not everyone gets to use a keyboard or can afford fancy voice-recognition software. If proper writing isn’t taught in schools, aren’t we, in essence, erasing all the stories that haven’t yet been written down?